


IHYLL

by kirkhammer



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, chalice dungeon, pthumeru, tomb prospector - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 10:28:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29434602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirkhammer/pseuds/kirkhammer
Summary: Let the Chalice reveal the Tomb of the Gods; let Blood be the Hunter's nourishment.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	IHYLL

**Author's Note:**

> For Madge! It's probably not quite what you requested, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless!
> 
> (A gift, from our bloodborne writing server's exchange!)

Deep below the rotted earth, the undead heavens breathe.

Dead stones cut from the world’s core and shaped by deader hands to hold the bodies of the Gods. They move through the gloom, these subtle cut figures, pale and gaunt. Fingers of ivory carving the darkness with forgotten figures, without the tongues to speak their reverence. Each moment counted by the distant strike of iron on stone, and iron on stone, stretching endlessly into the under earth. They have forgotten the flavour of the sun. Their bones know nothing of the resonance of Warmth and yet, here they wander. Here they toil. Here they sit, and sit, Hunter, waiting to remind you how to die. 

There is peace here, somehow. In the lurking dark, as wind echoes indelible words through these cavernous stone lungs. Not the autumn peace of a knoll, furred with emerald grass, the waning sun mottled by fading leaves, painting your skin with the last coloured warmth of summer. Not the warmth of captive fire, trapped in soft dark between walls and winter, the world hushed in the silence of snow, the sweet sound of snapping sap and branches turned to ember the only voice you hear in the heart of the vast cold. Here, too, there is flame, odd, inking the black with its ritual dance. Smoke lost in darkness’ fog. 

You know the feeling.

The stone beneath your boots is tarred with red. Mould creeps through cracks like brittle, feathered bone. Spores hang in the air like the glimmering cosmos. (They are spores, you tell yourself. They must be.) The rot that eats the world has torn through this place and left only its husk. The life that writhes in this darkness has pushed through its defences like buried fingers. Old death, settled in its rage. Not like you. 

The world you have learned up there, on the surface, is so alien to your own. Isn’t it? You’ve forgotten everything but the Pursuit that led you even here. To this other place, this solid stone, ancient and timeless. You _feel_ it. Your fingertips know the coarse bite of granite, the dense tug of slick mud as you misstep in a black chamber. The odour of rust, for once, comes from the crumbling iron strung above you and you _know_ the strange smoke that rises from those pink flames is a smell that you can’t quite name. The dirt here tastes like earth and oily bones have that clinging human scent that they ought to. There is something True that cuts through the endless coiling sprawl of this place, just as you do. Truth that is lost, or hidden in the soft invisible fog that rests behind your eyes when you stalk the City above. 

There is no stock to take, no way to map. The secrets this place holds are thinly veiled and already written in stone. There is nothing for you to learn here that has not already been etched into vellum and argued over for hundreds of years, though those scholars are long since dead. Bloated and sweetening in the piled streets like everyone else. The truest warning it held was too large and obvious for learned men to see. 

Your weapon is heavy, but you swing it anyway. 


End file.
